


Wind Up Where You Started From

by Dira Sudis (dsudis)



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-07
Updated: 2009-12-07
Packaged: 2017-10-04 06:03:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dsudis/pseuds/Dira%20Sudis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>post-"Children of Earth."  <i>Here sat two people who didn't know when to quit.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Wind Up Where You Started From

**Author's Note:**

> Torchwood Three belongs to Russell T. Davies, BBC Wales, Myfanwy, and the Rift. None of which are me.
> 
> Thanks to Iulia, Fox, and Molly for help and encouragement!
> 
> This story was first posted August 31, 2009.

He'd worked up a lot of momentum by the time he got back to Earth. He checked a newspaper to confirm that he'd hit the right date, consulted a map to be sure that the route he remembered actually existed, and did not stop moving until he'd rung the bell at Gwen Cooper's house.

It was only after, listening to the sound of the bell, that he considered that it was dark out--closer to getting light again than not, in fact--and that, unless something had gone very badly wrong, there would be a very small baby living in this house, and two very tired parents. Jack aimed an apologetic smile at the door, shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans, and waited.

It was about three minutes before the door opened, revealing a spill of soft, warm light from a farther room, and Gwen, looking tired but neither surprised nor angry, leaning on the door frame. She looked him up and down, taking in his--he couldn't help but thinking of it as a new costume. Only the wristband was the same as the last time she'd seen him. He'd changed his hair, too, cut it shorter; it showed little flecks of gray, now, in the right light.

"So," she said. "You're back."

Jack nodded, and kept his hands in his pockets. It was warmer on the other side of that door. Jack told himself it was the contrasting temperatures that made hair stand up on his bare arms.

"Come in, then," Gwen said, and turned away.

Jack locked the door behind him and then followed Gwen back toward the light, which came from a lamp in the lounge. There was a ... baby-pen of some kind, in one corner, with a blanket hanging over the side, blocking his view. Jack didn't look in, or even look toward it, just sat down in the chair Gwen waved him toward. She sat down on the sofa herself, and closed her eyes. In a conversational voice, she said, "It's all right, Rhys, I'll just talk to him a while. Go back to bed."

"You're sure?" Rhys's dubious voice came from the top of the stairwell.

Gwen opened her eyes and looked at Jack intently for a few seconds. She stood up again and went over to the baby-pen, and lifted out its occupant: a tiny little lump of humanity swaddled in pink flannel, with a thatch of dark hair. Gwen carried the baby over to Jack, placed the infant against his chest, and took her hands away; Jack caught the kid automatically, one hand under diaper-padded bum, one cradling the back of her head. The baby squirmed a bit, then was still, breathing under his hands like a small, sleepy bellows.

"Yes," Gwen said, still looking down at Jack, still without raising her voice. "I'm sure."

"Right then," Rhys said, and, after another pause, "don't drop the baby, Harkness."

Jack swallowed, and slouched a little in the chair, so his chest provided a slightly more horizontal surface, and found the words. "I won't."

Gwen sat down again, though this time she perched on the very end of the sofa nearest him. She was silent--watching the baby, or maybe watching Jack's hands--until there was the soft sound of a door closing, a bed's quiet creak. At last she smiled a little and said, "He's already dropped her once. Not far or anything, but now he's touchy about it."

Right. If it were Jack in particular who Rhys were being touchy about, he'd have said _don't sacrifice the baby to aliens_. Jack nodded understanding.

"So," Gwen said briskly, "do you have anything to say, or are you launching a second career as a street mime?"

Jack smiled a little for that, shook his head slightly. "I'm sorry," he offered. "I was alone for a long time on my way back. I'm... probably worse at being human than usual."

Gwen snorted. "I'll alert the authorities to be on the lookout, then."

Jack nodded, still smiling, and said, "I am, though. Sorry."

Gwen's smile faded, and her brows came down in concentration as she studied his face. His hands automatically tightened a bit on the baby.

He expected Gwen to ask him to articulate what he was sorry for, or to tell him to go apologize to someone who deserved it more, or first. The letter he'd written to Alice--the letter he'd spent so much time perfecting, down to the color of the ink and the texture of the paper, the slant of his handwriting and every curve of every comma--was heavy in his pocket, waiting to be mailed now that he'd come to the time and the place.

There was some small, burned-out part of him that wanted Gwen to just say _it's all right now_ or _I forgive you_ or _don't worry about that_, but she didn't. He knew better than to expect it, really, even from her.

Finally Gwen said, "How long has it been for you?"

Jack shrugged. "Hard to say. Closer to ten years than a hundred, I think."

Gwen nodded. Like she was working her way down a checklist, she asked evenly, "Are you done running away, now?"

Jack tucked his chin, touching his nose to the top of the baby's head, considering his answer. It was the central question, after all.

"I'm not sure," he said finally. "I got tired. I'm ready to hold still a while, but I don't know if here and now is the place for me, long term."

He had obligations here, he'd come to realize, and running away from them didn't actually eliminate them; he could return to the old Jack's habits, but he couldn't entirely shake the damned conscience he'd caught somewhere along the way. He owed Gwen this visit, and several more apologies. He owed Martha the chance to stomp all over him for his failure to consult her when she might have helped, honeymoon or no. He had to mail that letter to Alice, and then wait quietly to see if she had any response. He had no idea how much time he owed her to make up her mind about that--well, no. He knew that he owed Alice the rest of her life. He didn't know whether he would manage to give it; he'd proven himself so magnificently unreliable up to now.

He braced for another question down the same line, but Gwen's next question, gentler and frighteningly perceptive, was, "Did you ever hold Alice when she was that size?"

Jack looked up at that, and saw it all in Gwen's eyes--a mother's knowledge of what he'd done to Alice. And just maybe, a parent's knowledge of what he'd done to himself, when he harmed his daughter.

It looked something like compassion, or at least pity. Gwen had always had more empathy than any one person should bear--but the last of the Captain-worship was gone, annihilated. She knew him too well, now.

She'd handed him her baby anyway.

"Yeah," Jack said finally, looking back down at Gwen's baby, taking one long deep breath to every two of her tiny ones. "She was Melissa then, but yeah."

Gwen said nothing, and Jack could only let the silence stretch so far.

"I held Steven, too, when he was even smaller than this."

He'd been born a few weeks early, a tiny, fragile construction of skin and bone; Jack couldn't ever remember feeling so clumsy as when Alice laid the newborn in his hands.

"How can you stand it?" Jack whispered. "How can you go through every day looking at her and knowing you could--she could--"

"How could I not?" Gwen asked, her voice wavering a little. When Jack looked up, there were tears standing in her eyes. She brushed them impatiently away, and went on. "We're still here, Jack. We had a bloody close call and we had yet another lesson about how awful humans can be, but we're still here. We're still stuck on this planet together. We go on. So I hold my daughter and I make her a lot of stupid promises I probably can't keep, and I try to decide, once she's old enough to let my mum or Rhiannon watch her, where I'll go to work to do the most good keeping her safe. Her and David and Mica and every other child on this mess of a world."

Jack winced. He wished he could say something now to please her--wished he'd been fighting the fight, protecting the Earth, protecting anyone or anything--but the little he'd learned about the 456 he'd picked up almost accidentally. He'd debrief to Martha, once she'd done her first round of yelling at him; she'd know who could best use the information.

"What about you?" Gwen returned, sounding a little frustrated, as well as baffled. "How do you go on? Why do you keep coming back?"

"I've spent most of my life in Cardiff," Jack said, shrugging minutely. The baby didn't seem to mind the motion. "I guess... when I don't know where else to go, I come here. A lot of the important things have happened here. It's kind of... home. And I can't stop. I'll always still be around, no matter how bad it gets. Self-destruction gets old after a while, when it doesn't take."

Gwen said nothing. Jack shifted the baby a little--she was awfully warm--and then gave up and moved her to the crook of his arm, resting his free hand on the round of her belly. It expanded and contracted under his palm, and Gwen was still silent. Jack looked into the baby's face, thinking of Alice, of Steven, of everyone he knew on Earth--all of them had been this size once, and he might have held them in his arms just the same way, if he'd happened to be in the neighborhood just then.

"I couldn't do anything so bad that I stopped caring about what I did back here--" he shook his head and forced himself to be exact, "about killing Steven, and sacrificing the first twelve kids. Believe me, I tried. And I couldn't do anything good enough to balance it out. I could do anything I wanted out there, go anywhere, it just... it never seemed real. Not like here."

"So here we are," Gwen said, sounding beyond tired, sounding worn out.

Jack nodded.

It seemed wrong to speak of it here. He could see it rising from the ashes--that had happened plenty of times. It was harder to see it rising from a comfortable family home, from the midst of a sleeping baby and sleeping daddy and tired mama. Still--here sat two people who didn't know when to quit, and that was about all it took to start the thing up again.

"Torchwood?"

Gwen sighed. "That's one option. Are you here recruiting, then?"

Jack shook his head. "I don't know. I haven't got anything to recruit _to_, I don't think. I inherited Torchwood, and I don't know what's left to salvage of it anymore. I met Lady MacLeish once, in 1891--she didn't exactly found Torchwood, but she was the Lady of Torchwood House, which was the first central office, and she was part of the group who built the whole thing from the ground up. _She_ terrified me--they were ready to take on aliens armed with rifles and steam power, with no knowledge base at all, just making it all up as they went. I don't know if I'm..."

He shook his head. He _would_ do it, of course, if it came to that, but... he'd almost rather run again, and he was sick to death--to a hundred deaths--of running.

"Salvage is right," Gwen sighed. "They've still got that half of the Plass barricaded. Three workmen have been killed trying to excavate it, and it keeps... settling. Deeper."

Jack thought of the architecturally improbable warren of subbasements, the tunnels, their variously dangerous and unstable contents, the _Rift_, and winced. A bomb had probably been overkill; surely it would have collapsed under its own weight at some point no matter what they did.

"There's UNIT," Gwen said, sounding equally unenthusiastic. "They've just about got a permanent presence here now, with the Hub wreckage unresolved, and they've come round consulting a few times, and had me in to look at what they've found. Or I could go back to the police."

"Would you put in a good word for me there?" Jack summoned up a small smile. "What do you think, Constable Jack Harkness?"

Gwen smiled dutifully in return. "Sure, as long as it means I can stick you with fetching the coffee."

Jack opened his mouth to make a crack about the coffee, but Gwen went abruptly quite still. Of course. But that was one obligation he carried with him wherever he went--if he had any debt to the Davieses, he'd long since delegated it to Gwen, and from the familiar way she spoke their names, she was honoring it in full.

"Could we..." Jack said, and found he didn't have to work to make his voice sound worn down to some very thin edge. "Could we not talk about him just yet?"

"All right," Gwen allowed. "Not just yet."

Jack nodded, accepting the temporary stay. In his arm, the baby blinked up at him with slate-blue eyes, squirmed, and then turned her head inquisitively against his chest.

"Oh," Jack said, as her nuzzling took on purpose. "Gwen..."

"Right, over to me." Gwen stood and lifted her daughter away from him, and Jack shook out his arm. He'd forgotten how such a tiny weight added up, when you had to hold it steady.

Jack got to his feet as well, and gestured vaguely toward the door. "I should probably, um..."

"Come back in daylight sometime," Gwen said, nodding distractedly as she rocked the baby.

"Yeah, I will, I--oh." Jack realized abruptly just how many niceties they'd skipped over, along with the hugging and crying and whatever, back there at the door. "Hey, you never introduced me. What's her name?"

He braced himself, in the next second, for something meaningful; Gwen smiled.

"We ruled out the names of everybody either of us knew. We thought she should get a fresh start, so we just chose it out of a book."

Gwen turned her daughter to face him. "Jack, meet Isobel. Isobel, Jack."

Jack blinked. Isobel MacLeish had been in her forties when they met--already getting old, by Victorian standards. She'd been grey-haired and thin and even more tired than Gwen, used hard and very nearly used up. Lady MacLeish had offered him a stiffly formal apology for the indignities he'd suffered at the hands of Torchwood, and declined to free him from them. "_I will use whatever resources come to hand, Captain, including yourself. I am afraid no personal concern can take precedence over our work._"

"Oh," Jack said softly. "Isobel."

Gwen's mouth was open on a silent question--_who?_\--but Jack shook his head, and leaned down to press the kiss he hadn't offered to Gwen to Isobel's cheek. "I'll try not to fuck it up so badly this time, Isobel."

Gwen's eyebrows were raised when Jack straightened up, but she made no comment on promises, only said very mildly, "Language, Jack."

He flashed her a smile, and dared to kiss her cheek, too, then. "Sorry, Gwen. And--sorry."

Gwen nodded, and was immediately distracted when Isobel started to fuss. Jack turned without further words and let himself out. He didn't stop walking until he got to the end of the street, and then he stood on the corner to think it through.

He didn't think he believed in signs, particularly. He had just barely come to accept the existence of coincidences. He did believe in causality flowing in a lot of unexpected directions, but this didn't seem to have quite that flavor--though he'd admit it took strange forms. He was pretty damned sure he didn't believe Isobel MacLeish had been reincarnated in the tiny, helpless person of Gwen's little girl.

Still, he'd been looking for a direction, and this would do as well as any; it was true enough that he still didn't know when to quit. Jack turned decisively in the direction of the Plass and its barricaded disaster area. He might as well see what he had left to work with.


End file.
